World News Quick Take

Agencies

UNITED STATES

FBI releases shooter video

The FBI released surveillance video and photos of Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis on Wednesday and said he believed electromagnetic waves had been controlling him for months before the rampage that killed 12 people. There are no signs that Alexis, 34, was targeting anybody in the Sept. 16 shooting at the Navy Yard in southeast Washington, said Valerie Parlave, the FBI assistant director in charge of the Washington field office. “We have found relevant communications on his electronic media, which referenced the delusional belief that he was being controlled or influenced by extremely low frequency electromagnetic waves for the past three months,” Parlave told a press conference.

UNITED STATES

Bush a witness at wedding

A spokesman said former president George H.W. Bush was an official witness at the same-sex wedding of two longtime friends in Maine. Jim McGrath said Bush and his wife, Barbara, attended the ceremony on Saturday joining Bonnie Clement and Helen Thorgalsen. He said they were there as private citizens and friends. A photo posted on Sunday on Thorgalsen’s Facebook page shows Bush signing the marriage license as a witness. She captioned the photo: “Getting our marriage license witnessed.” The 41st president has deep ties to the area and owns a compound in Kennebunkport. Thorgalsen and Clement own a general store in neighboring Kennebunk.

GREECE

Tax office rocked by blast

A bomb exploded early yesterday outside a tax office in northern Athens, causing material damage, but no injuries, police said. The explosion in Kifissia district was preceded by telephone warnings placed by an anonymous caller to a news Web site, a daily newspaper and police said. According to the Web site Zougla.gr, which received one of the calls, the explosive was placed in a bag outside the building. Such attacks are often blamed on the local extremist or anarchist movement.

UNITED STATES

Pigs terrorize neighborhood

Wild pigs have descended on a suburban Atlanta neighborhood where they are scaring children, making a general nuisance of themselves and acting as they if they own the place. One large specimen was sighted on Monday morning rummaging through garbage it had strewn across Taneisha Danner’s front yard in Lithonia, east of downtown Atlanta. It then trotted into the backyard, taking a nap, before returning with three other pigs from a patch of nearby woods, Danner said on Tuesday. “This is their home,” Danner joked. “We’re just visiting.” However, she said the animals are no laughing matter for neighborhood children, noting that some are now afraid to leave the safety of their homes.

UNITED STATES

Feces protects termite nests

Scientists trying to understand why destructive wood-eating termites are so resistant to efforts to exterminate them have come up with an unusually repugnant explanation. Termites’ practice of building nests out of their own feces creates a scatological force field that Florida scientists now believe is the reason biological controls have failed to stop their pestilential march all over the world. A nine-year study concluded that termite feces act as a natural antibiotic, growing good bacteria in the subterranean nests that attack otherwise deadly pathogens, according to the findings published this month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.